How Chief Scientist John Fagan’s research is supporting the global regenerative agriculture movement

Hi, friends. This is John, and this is the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where we talk about the agronomic sciences and the cultural management practices that are needed to regenerate soil health and plant health and ultimately public health. I'm really looking forward to this conversation today. My guest for this episode is John Fagan from HRI Labs in Iowa. John is a detective, a very good detective in the laboratory, finding things that people sometimes might prefer not be found, sometimes finding things that people didn't know could be found. Both compounds that we might consider to be a positive and some that we don't know about, and some that we might prefer to avoid. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. John, thank you for joining me here today.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you, John. And I've enjoyed our earlier conversations and I'm really looking forward to this one.

Yeah, I am as well. John, can you offer a little bit of context and history? Tell us about the scope of the work that you're doing, the projects that you're working on, and some of the things that you're fascinated by.

Yes, we're excited about understanding everything that could be present in a food. We all know about the, what, like, 25 or 30 nutrients that the USDA reports on for different foods. But there's a whole lot more than that. Plants, for instance, are these amazing chemists that deal with everything in their environment through chemistry. Literally, any plant is going to have thousands of compounds present. Think of it this way. For us, for mammals or for organisms that can move around, if we're having a problem with the environment, we just move. But what if you're a tree? No moving. Yeah, no moving. And you have made. You sort of placed your bet on this particular point in the universe as being where you're going to be for the next 150 years. And what you can do to adapt is to maybe grow a little bit in different directions to catch the sun a little bit better. But mostly you're going to use chemistry. The bugs start eating at your leaves. You create something that makes them go away or gives them a stomach ache. Some heat, a heat pressure comes up, a heat stress comes up. You produce compounds that allow you to adapt and handle that, or drought stress. You grow your roots a little deeper, but you also use other compounds to help protect you from that drought. So this is what happens in many of these compounds. Although a compound may be produced to protect the plant from a pest, that compound may be extremely useful and helpful for human beings as a Nutrient or as a medicinal component. So we're interested in these things, and we're using very powerful analytical tools to look deep in and to discover the. The compounds that may be present in these plants. That's really an interesting journey that we're taking.

Discovery is always a lot of fun, and it's something that not lots of people get the opportunity to do. We're often following other people's footsteps who've gone before. I don't often get to have a conversation with people who are actually engaged in actively looking for and discovering new things. Can you tell us a little bit about that process? What does that look like? How do you go about discovering something that has not been identified before?

Now I'll go into that, but first I'd like to acknowledge that you are an explorer. You are out there discovering new approaches, new strategies for making crops more nutritious, more sustainable, protecting our environment so that, you know, using methods that are protecting the environment. So you are a discoverer. We're kindred spirits on that level. But the way that we do it is that we will take a plant material or an animal material. We recently did a project with poultry, and we will actually use different chemicals to extract the components, the compounds that are present in that food material, that plant, or that animal material. And then we actually use very powerful analytical tools to detect those. And the first kind of analytical tool is what's called chromatography. So that extract that we've made may contain a thousand different compounds. And chromatography is a method for fractionating that, separating it, so that you get in one end of the machine, you put the mixture, and out the other end come the individual compounds one at a time. And then what you do is we have analytical methods to look as each of those compounds comes out. It goes into a machine called a mass spectrometer. And that mass spectrometer essentially measures the mass of that compound to four or five decimal places. And then it also, it blows the molecule up. And one reason people get into chemistry is because they like to blow up things, you know? You know, you make something, you have a. You put two chemicals together and boom, out comes a big puff of smoke or something. This is it. And that's what got me into it. I still remember as I was a kid in my mother's basement, blowing something up and having a big blue stain on the ceiling from it, you know, so, but here what we do is we blow these molecules up under very controlled conditions, and then we measure the fragments of them, and from the size and the charge of those fragments, we can deduce something about the structure of those molecules. And in fact, by comparing that pattern of fragments, it's sort of like a fingerprint. And so by comparing that fragment pattern with patterns that are present in databases of thousands, tens of thousands of molecules, we can oftentimes actually measure or identify what those compounds are. So out of that thousand compounds that we have in that mixture, maybe we can measure four or five hundred of them and identify. We can measure them all and say, how much of them are there? But we can identify maybe 40 or 50% of them. And from that we can learn. Now, you know, those are molecules that have been discovered by many different people over the years and characterized maybe in different plants or in different things. But we're saying, oh, that's present in kale or in barley or in, you know, some other thing like that. And maybe we didn't know that it was present in that plant before, but now we're discovering it. So that's the kind of thing we do.

So you're discovering these different compounds and plants, but if you can only identify 40 or 50%, then what is the remainder? 60%? What happens with that?

Well, that's the discovery area. It's sort of like in physics, they know there's this thing called dark. They call it dark matter. That's responsible for actually a large proportion, more than 50% of all the mass in the universe. But we don't know what it is, so they call it dark matter. So these things, these compounds that we don't have names for them, you know, you can think of them as the dark matter of the plant world. You know, there are chemical ways of isolating a compound and then characterizing it and coming up with a structure. And then once you have a structure, you can ask, well, what does it do? You know, is it good for plants? Is it good for. For. If we feed it to a cell culture, do the cells grow? Are they healthy? Are they less healthy? Or if you feed it to a mouse, what happens? Or if you feed it to your livestock, what happens? You know, you have to use these sort of biological methods to understand it this way.

I'm really intrigued. When you were describing your process of identifying or evaluating all these different compounds, I fully expected that you might say there' or 10% that are not identified or that aren't known, that still remain to be identified. But to say that that's 50 to 60%, that's a big proportion. That's much bigger than I expected.

That tells us about why we should be humble. Humble because we don't know that much. And literally any biologist that tells you that we know more than about 15% of what there is to know about life is totally out of this world in terms of their, you know, the size of their ego about. If a physicist says, oh, yeah, we know 100% of what there is to know, they're just completely, you know, it's crazy. So the universe is so full of new and, you know, things to discover that that's what being a scientist is all about. It's what really being a human being is all about. We get excited about new things and that's, you know, that's what we're doing.

So tell us a bit about what is it that you're discovering as you're looking at different plants? Obviously, we have a common interest in defining what is nutrient density and what does nutritious food actually look like. There's, there's lots of unanswered questions around this space, so I'd love to get your perspective on this. What are some of the things that you are discovering and observing?

Yeah, well, that's a great question. You know, there's the dark matter, which we don't know much about, but there's also quite a diversity in plants that has. That we know about, or we know the molecular level, but we don't know about those particular plants. So, for instance, the kind of experiment that we usually are doing is comparing different production methods, you know, like. Or production systems like organic versus conventional or biodynamic versus organic. Or we're going to be starting a project soon where we're comparing organic, real organic crops with hydroponic organic crops, which are by some considered organic, but by many of us are considered not organic. So what we can do with any of these comparisons, I can imagine there's.

A certain berry crop on the west coast who might not be excited about that research.

This is probably true. This is probably true. We'll probably be looking directly at their crops. Actually, these comparisons are. What we're putting our focus on right now is, yes, there are the things that we don't know about right now. And sometimes you'll look at a potato and there are four or five compounds there that are highly abundant in the potato, but we don't know anything about them. We can't identify. So now we're putting that aside as being really the cutting edge. But in the meantime, we're asking, okay, of the compounds we can identify, what are the differences between organic and conventional, or if I use this kind of a mulching system versus this kind of production practices, what are the differences? And from that we can learn a lot about what makes a plant healthy and what inspires that plant to make things that are good for people. And those are the things that we're focusing on now. It's an important question. It isn't the total pioneering area, but it's still very important that way. We're finding, for instance, that there are a lot of antioxidants and polyphenols and these sorts of things that are higher in organic than in conventional. We also see some other things there. I see a puzzlement on your face. Maybe you have a question.

In one sense, it's not a surprise to find things. Let me back up a bit. There's this recurring conversation. It seems every couple of years there's a new major publication that has to chime in with an article in the popular press that says something like organics have been disproven to be more nutritious than conventional crops or milk or whatever the topic of the day might be. I always find that to be an interesting framing of the position because when you think about what organic certification, the way organic certification is framed, is not about optimizing nutrition, it's about reducing toxins. So I find it interesting that this conversation keeps being framed around nutrition. And now you are describing that you're actually observing significant nutritional differences between organic and non organic grown crops. Can you give us a bit of flavor of what exactly are you observing? And I think another interesting question might be what insights do you have into what is producing these differences?

One of the projects we're doing right now, we're seeing quite striking differences in the lipids between them. We're seeing higher amounts of some of the Omega 3s. We're seeing higher amounts of some Omega 9s as well. These are things that are actually, other people have looked at these things in different crops. But in general, what we're finding, the things that are most striking are in the area of these secondary metabolites, the things like the polyphenols, the bioflavonoids, the triterpenoids, these sorts of things. And there, these are adaptive compounds and these are compounds that respond to the environment in that way. And they're also very important for the nutrition of a crop. And so we see see these things changing. The interesting thing is that we're finding, if you look at the, the past history that you've been talking about, about nutrition in organic for Instance, what you see is somebody will say, I betcha, I bet you that omega 3s are higher in organic than in conventional. Or they'll say, I bet you that organic is going to have higher levels of vitamin C in those berries or in tomatoes or in this or that. And those are bets, because what they're doing is they're going in and they're looking at a single compound, or it's a handful of them. And what they see is, well, sometimes they get something, sometimes they don't. And that's oftentimes the source of these newspaper articles that you've been mentioning is that they don't really. They're just taking a shot and asking if something happens. But what we're doing is something very different, which is that we're asking quite a different question. The question is, of all the compounds that we can measure in this particular plant or in this particular vegetable, is there anything that changes? What we typically are finding is 20 or 30 things that change, and that is a whole lot different than finding vitamin C changed or one other thing. And what that tells us is, first of all that there's a significant difference in the physiology of the organically grown crop compared to the conventional. But it also, it tells you that, well, among those things that are changed physiologically, there are probably some that are nutritionally important too. So that's one point to be made around that. But there's another thing which in a way takes us beyond organic. And I think this is part of your mindset, John, is that you're looking more broadly at agricultural practices, and it should be possible to look at the results of what we get and from that get hints at what new thing, what new practices could be done to refine things and improve the nutrition. You know, in an earlier conversation, you mentioned that somebody is doing some really interesting breeding with, I think it was oats and getting whole lot higher levels of lipids in the oats and things like that, which was really interesting to me. So genetics is one thing you can change, but you can also change a whole lot of other practices. And I bet you could outline, identify several of them that you feel are highly likely to give rise to these sorts of changes and differences.

Yeah, I think genetics are an important one. But there has been, in my opinion, there has been a general lack of appreciation for the impact of epigenetics and how you can rapidly change way faster than we commonly anticipate. You can change the way a given variety expresses itself from one generation to the next based on how you Manage nutrition and the microbiome where there can be radical changes, particularly in non hybridized varieties and the open pollinated varieties, there can be really dramatic positive improvements in a single generation. I want to go back to your comments on compounds when you're doing some of these analysis comparing organic versus non organic, which I understand the rationale for that framing from a research perspective, but of course I think agriculture is much bigger than just that binary perspective. You mentioned that you might find 20 or 30 different compounds that are changing. How much are they changing? How variable are they? Are some of them going up, some of them going down? Are we talking about 5 to 10% changes? What does the variability look like?

That's the amazing thing. If you look at the research that's been published for organic, I just use that as an example here. You'll see changes of 30% or 80% or sometimes a doubling. We find some in that category too. But typically in the sort of analysis that we do, we will start out with hundreds of compounds that we're looking at and we'll need to winnow it down to the interesting ones. And those interesting ones may be changing. We toss them out if they're not changing twofold, and most of them are changing threefold, Eightfold in that range. And we find some 15 or 20 fold. And these are of course, adaptive compounds, these, what do you call them, secondary metabolites that are expected to be responsive.

That way a 15 or a 20x variability is significant. Obviously from a nutritional value perspective, that's a really big deal.

Yeah, yeah. And see, a lot of these compounds may, under many conditions may change, they'll change, but they may not change enough to make a difference nutritionally. But if you can, you know, if you see that level of change, then it's, it can be significant that way. It's quite striking.

Can you give us any examples of any specific crops or you mentioned some animal products that you're working on as well. Can you give us any examples of some of the variability that you've observed?

We've compared, for instance, two different batches, different productions of licorice. Okay, this is a crop, but it was striking. It's something that you'd expect, expect to see higher levels of some of the compounds. We saw a change in luteolin of 15 fold. You know, it's one polyphenol and in quercetin that, in that same plant we saw about a five or six fold change. So those are examples of the kinds of things we can see. And we do see some Things going down and something's going up. So it depends on. And that was comparing sort of run of the mill conventional licorice with a biodynamic licorice. I don't know whether it was the practices that were important there or whether it was the genetics or whether it was the environment in those situations. This was a one off kind of comparison. But to really understand that you need to look at all of those and you have to look at the microbiome as well. You know, so we're just very early in this. So we're, we're learning. With potatoes, I'm trying to think what we saw there. There were two or three of the lipids that were changed. I'd have to look up the details, but because there were several of them, you know, but there were two or three of them that were in the range of five to five, between five and tenfold changes there. That was interesting.

I seem to recall from one of our earlier conversations it might have been potatoes or might have been another crop where you were describing that there were some compounds showing up on the organically grown crop that were completely absent on the non organic crops. Am I recalling that correctly?

Yeah, yeah, that's true. And that to me it's. And those were, those were some of the, a couple of lipids. And the question is that indicates some significant change in their metabolism, that they've gone, that they're operating in a very different way under these circumstances. And you know, the lipids, the polyphenols are typically, or they can be stress response compounds. The lipids in the potatoes, for instance, there were, was quite a substantial higher level of lipids in general that we saw. We saw, we'll see in organic versus conventional. We'll see some things go up with the organic and some go down, but typically with the lipids, we saw more in the organic than in the conventional. And I sort of wondered if that is that just a response to the lower level of stress for that plant so that it sort of is happier and so it expresses more of those things. It's really, you know, it's really mysterious that way.

Yeah. I suspect that lipid synthesis is, in our observation, our crude observation, it is often a response to better microbial communities in the microbiome rather than absorbing lots of nutrition in the ionic form.

So there are more organic compounds that they're able to take up from the environment. And that actually fits with what happens in human beings. In a way you can think of us as having our roots in our gut. It's like the gut is our soil in a way. And so what happens in our gut is the microorganisms generate different, for instance, fatty acids, small fatty acids, the butyric acid, propionic acid, things like that. And that is what is the sort of the starting point for the lipids that we make in our system. It all sort of fits.

So this is obviously something you're really passionate about. You're spending a lot of time working on it. What are the implications of your research and identifying all of the variability in these different compounds? What are the implications for farmers and for consumers in general?

There are implications for both of them because I think for farmers, what we're doing, it can give them hints at how to improve their practices and thereby improve yields, improve quality, and also ideally improve the market value of their product that they can actually put out there a premium product that's going to be of greater value to the buyer and therefore to them and for consumers, it's just a matter of the nutritional value. And as we explore this further, there will be more information on nutritional value. We're still so early into this. To collaborate with good growers and people who really have a deep understanding of the practices side of agriculture is going to open up some really interesting new insights into this area.

Well, I would anticipate on the consumer side, there's not only implications for nutritional value, but also for flavor and aroma taste, which are all the things that we really care about as consumers as well.

Absolutely. That's a big step forward. For instance, you see a few compounds. I've heard that dipeptides are a contributor to flavor, and you can see differences in dipeptides with different practices. It's a limited piece of that picture. Also, the levels of some of the amino acids are quite different. This is free amino acids, not the amino acids in proteins, but the free amino acids. And those also are very important for flavor.

And based on what I've read in the literature, my understanding is that the presence and the ratio of those free amino acids also has a significant influence on disease susceptibility and insect susceptibility as well.

That's really true. And also it's sort of like the sugars, too. If there are too many sugars, the bugs are going to go after your plant. Some of the amino acids, they have the same effect.

If growers want to learn more about the work that you're doing and possibly collaborate in getting some of their products tested, what would be the best pathway to go about that?

There are a couple Ways one is give me a call. And that's simple. But we actually have a new project that I have named it. It isn't official yet. The idea behind it is embodied in this tentative name and it's called the Farmer Led Innovation Network. This started with one of the people that I met about a year and a half ago now. He put on a conference up in Canada in Winnipeg. It was really cold in January.

Why would you want to go to.

Winnipeg in January for this conference? It was worth it, actually. And this was, I think it was the last conference I went to before the pandemic sort of put us all back home. I talked about this work there. And the guy who put the conference on is a longtime member of the agro industrial operation in Canada. After the conference, he called me up and he says, you know, I talked about a lot of what I've talked about with you today. He says, you know, I've been growing this wheat for a couple years now using the Albrecht method, and I think it's going to have better nutrition than regular wheat. And I'm wondering if we could use your method to compare them. And so I said, oh, this would be really exciting, Harvey. I'd love to do this. And so we started talking about it and he asked me, well, how much does it cost? And I said, well, see, this is, and this is the challenge with what we do is that it's not like people think of sending a sample in and getting a test and you pay a couple hundred dollars and you get a result. You know, how much vitamin C is there or vitamin A or something like that? This is a little different because each project is a little research project. About the smallest we can do is the normal wheat versus the Albrecht wheat. Comparing two samples and it costs about $8,500. For my mass spec expert, the guy who actually runs this work, to do that work, it's going to take several days in the laboratory and then quite a lot of from each sample we get a 4 gigabyte data set. And so when you're trying to analyze that, you don't do it in five minutes. It's a lot of work he'll spend on those two samples. He'll spend three days. Because it's a win win process. You start out with data for 1000 or 1500 compounds and then you ask okay of that data. So there's probably some garbage there and we have some ways of sorting that out. We get rid of that and then we ask, well, what compounds are present or change in Significant levels. And we toss out another probably 20% of things that are there. Maybe they're interesting, but there's so little of them there that we're maybe going to not focus on them this time. And then we take the rest and we begin to ask, well, how much of them is present and what kinds of changes do we have, and like that. So it takes some time, and it's actually not something that we can give to a bachelor's degree student and have them bring that out. It takes some very sophisticated software and expertise using that software and a knowledge of chemistry, of natural products. Basically, that's about what it costs. And so I said this to Harvey. I said, harvey, the minimum we could do without me losing money on it, you know, would be about $8,500. So I could tell he went white on the other end of the phone. He says, well, you know, I can't afford that. And I say, you know, I'd love to do it. Let's find some funding somewhere and we can do it, you know. And that was about the end of that conversation. But about a week later, he comes back to me and he says, you know, I went out and I was. I've got friends, you know, who are also growing wheat out here, and I got five of them interested in this project. We're each going to put in $1,350 and we'll be able to do it. So that was the start of something that has evolved over the last year where Harvey started out with wheat. And then he comes, raises, you know, we need to do barley, too. And a week later, it was oats. And pretty soon he had a list of probably 10 different things that he was interested in. And he's starting to go out and talk to his buddies about these things. And so we're saying, okay, so we're going to do one of these at a time, and we'll see what's going on like that. And then he. At one point, he's out there talking to his friends and getting people lined up to do this. And he comes back, he says, john, we've got to take this in a different way. If we do these one at a time, I'm going to die before they're all over, and I want to see the results. Then we came up with a plan where we're going to take the 20, 21 harvest for each of these things, and we're going to test them all this year. And he's already lined up more than half of the people to do this. And he's working every day to get these lined up for everybody. It's like it's grown of its own accord. And then there was an interesting angle that came up a few weeks ago where Harvey got me in front of two people and he's from Canada, but these are people from the us. One of them is part of a team that's growing about 4,40,000 acres of non GMO soy and corn. They do the standard thing, you know, and they're doing this and they do some innovative stuff as well. They're on their own farm, they're doing that. It was a brother and a sister. And so we're going through this and talking about it and the sister gets all excited, she's got an idea and she says, you know, my brother's John Deere planter is all wired up with all this data collection stuff and his harvester does the same thing. They collect, you say, four gigabytes. That's nothing. We're collecting terabytes of data. And I think if we put your data on the quality of the product together with our data that we're collecting from these machines, we're going to learn some new things and it's going to improve practices. It was that conversation and a couple more like it that got me to think about this as a farmer led innovation network. And I think we're partway there. And the interesting thing is that these are not all a bunch of organic farmers. These are people who are doing large scale and they're looking at, well, how can we do agriculture more creatively? There certainly are key parts of organic that need to be included. Like, well, you don't want to use glyphosate. Okay. But at the same time, there's an opportunity for sort of free form innovation there that could take things to a whole other level with a team like this. And the other element of this is that when you're getting six people to do one experiment and you're doing this with 10 experiments, what you're doing is crowdsourced research. And that sort of, to me is another sort of innovative dimension of this that is really exciting. That's one story about what we're doing and how farmers can really get involved with this. So it's really exciting.

That is really exciting, John.

So in short, if people want to.

Become involved, connect with you at HRI Labs.

Yep. Huh. And we would love to go with it's mostly field crops now. I'd love to do this with horticultural crops as well. And nuts, vegetables yeah, veggies, you know, and fruit and some nuts. You know, all of those could be really interesting. And sometime in the future maybe we get to do some tropical crops. I really love to look at something like cocoa and tea and things like that and some of the other interesting crops that are so important to so many people around the world. Anyway, that's the story there.

John, looking at all of this exploratory work and this discovery work is something that's really exciting because it gives us a pathway into describing the untapped opportunities that we have in front of us of how we can produce more nutritious food. I'm really excited to discover the work that you are doing in identifying new compounds and kind of playing detective, as I mentioned at the introduction. And I know that you also are very good at playing detective at finding things that a few people might prefer not be found. And in this case, you mentioned a few minutes ago the challenges of using glyphosate even in non organic systems. And I know that in previous conversations here on the podcast, I've had Bob Quinn on where he talked about, about finding glyphosate even on organic fields that had not had any glyphosate, applied it for 30 years because it was showing up in the rainfall. And it's my understanding that you led the development of some analytical tools to find glyphosate and AMPA that were much more sensitive than what had been used prior to that point. So I know this is a topic of growing concern for many different growers as they become more aware of the, the challenges of the impacts that glyphosate has on soil biology and soil health. So I'd love to get your perspective on what is the state of the landscape. What does glyphosate presence look like in different types of foods and agricultural products and in soil profiles?

Good question. We've spent quite some time in the last few years looking at this. We've done work on this for companies who are concerned about the quality of their products and the potential presence of glyphosate there. And we've also worked with scientists who are interested in questions about the levels of glyphosate that might be present in the physiology and what those might the impact that might have on our health. So these things we've all worked on, and it's fascinating. We do find, as Bob Quinn mentioned, we do find glyphosate even in organic products, but at orders of magnitude lower levels in general than in conventional. We may see for instance, 10 nanograms per gram of a product, for instance, in wheat or in soybeans that are grown by organic methods, whereas in conventional you may see 800 or 1,000. I've seen 2,000 nanograms per gram of that. So the differences are huge. It makes good sense to eat organic. But there are also some times when we find in looking at many, many organic products, we run into one once in a while that is pretty hot. And so it indicates that there is a level of not completely ethical things going on out there, but that's a vast majority. And so you're always safer. If you're worried about pesticides in your diet, you're always safer with organic than with the other things that are out there. But your own garden is really the best place to grow, you know, and so that's good.

So this is obviously a very politically charged and very sensitive conversation for many growers. And there's a number of challenging questions that come up. But does 2000 parts per billion really matter? Does 800 parts per billion really matter? What's the level that really matters? That's one of the questions that comes up. So I'd love to get your thoughts on that. And then I'd also love to get your thoughts on how has the ability to detect glyphosate evolved and how is it different today from perhaps, let's say, a decade ago?

Here's the striking thing that According to the U.S. department of, I think this was an EPA number, but they say that it's safe to eat 1.75 milligrams of glyphosate. I should get the graph out, really. But it's like there's a 20,000 fold difference between what they consider safe and what the most recent science tells us is safe. That's the difference. So the levels that we're finding in organic are in the range of safe. But at the high end of organic, what we've been seeing, the things that are sort of not intentionally polluted, but things that have been contaminated by a neighbor at a more serious level, those are even concerning. The most sensitive thing for us is something called non alcoholic fatty liver disease. And there's clear evidence that glyphosate at tiny levels will cause this problem. And this is actually, there's a silent epidemic of non alcoholic fatty liver disease in the developed world. And you ask if you happen to come down with this and about 20% of the population has this or is moving in that direction. You ask your physician, they'll say, well, you should probably lose a little weight, but in fact they don't really know why it's happening. And the reality is that there are a lot of skinny people who have non alcoholic fatty liver disease. So that's the low end. The levels at say 10 nanograms per gram in say oats or other crops like that, that's enough to cause a problem.

10 nanograms per gram, that's 10 parts per billion.

Yep. That's enough to cause big problems. If your diet, essentially we've done calculations of we take a normal diet of 2,000 calories a day, which is typical, and you figure out what the proportion of carbohydrates are in that diet, what proportion of grains there are in that typical diet, and then you ask of those grains, if you have 10 parts per billion, is that a problem? Is it a problem if you have 100 parts per billion or 1000 parts per billion and you quickly go to levels that are very concerning at 10 parts per billion you're just, you're okay, you don't want to go much above that.

You mentioned in passing that the levels the EPA or the. Yeah, I think it's the EPA is considers to be safe versus those that the latest science considers to be safe are orders of magnitude separated. What is the latest science that you would refer people to if they want to dig into this more deeply?

That's a good question. There are some scientific papers, if somebody wants to send me their email, I will send them some links to some things that have been published on this. But there are several papers that have established that you do have problems at those low levels. And also I can share with you a couple PDF pages that give an overview of this. And I wish I had thought of it ahead of time. I would have had a slide ready to go that shows this. It's pretty shocking, actually.

It's my understanding that there has been an evolution that you played a part in, in upgrading the or refining the analytical tools to find the glyphosate and also to find ampa. And that historically we were not able to find it in as nearly as sensitive manner as we are now. Can you expand on that a little bit and just let me know if I'm correct on that. And what has the landscape looked like in terms of analytical sensitivity for both glyphosate and ampa?

There's been a big evolution in that in the last five years and the methods, the old fashioned methods required that you extract. Extract it and then you actually had to chemically modify the glyphosate before you could run it through the analytical systems that are used. And that whole complex process resulted in sensitivities that were literally. I'll tell you about the other methods that we're now using, and then I'll talk about the sensitivities. The methods that we've been using are much, much simpler. And it's because there have been some evolutions in the mass spectrometry methodologies and also in the chromatographic methods that allow you to actually analyze the free glyphosate and the free ampa, which is a metabolite of glyphosate. And that increased sensitivity allows us to see things down at levels that are much more relevant to health in this way. And what we have actually done, we stand on the shoulders of other scientists who have worked on this before. Up until we got involved, the limits of detection that were published were in the range of 0.2 parts per billion. And we have taken that down to limits of detection of 0.02 parts per billion, or 20 parts per trillion, basically. And we can quantify accurately anything at 50 parts per trillion or above. And this allows us to really see what's going on to tell you a lot about the impacts on the environment, too. One of the things that we've developed that hadn't been done before is a really good method for analyzing glyphosate in soil. And we have now, and also ampa, and we have now taken that to that level of sensitivity. We can Quantify down to 50 parts per trillion. And that's very relevant. For instance, we have done a study with. Done some work with a science, it hasn't been published yet at a scientist at the University of Missouri who has sent us samples from the same fields over three years. And we have looked at the levels of glyphosate in ampa. One of those fields has not had AMPA for that or glyphosate added to it for that whole period of time. Other fields have gotten it every year. And what we see every year, the levels in the soil go up. So it's not that it's being degraded as quite quickly as it's being added to the soil. And what we find with the field that hasn't been treated with glyphosate over those years is that it's going down, but it's only going down about 20% every year. And so it's a very slow process to degrade it. And it's probably microbes that are breaking it down. The first thing we see is that the glyphosate goes down in the epigo up and then over time the AMPA begins to go down as well. So those are the things that we're seeing. We also see this, we're measuring it now in some pretty interesting things for human beings. We've been measuring it in urine and recently we've, over the last year we've been measuring it also in hair. And so we can actually look at the long term level of exposure in hair because it sort of accumulates there, whereas in urine you're looking at the levels that are there from what you ate over the last two or three days, basically.

So what are the implications for soil health and for crop productivity? I know I'm asking you a question that I've talked about any number of times with different people, but I'd love to get your perspective. What are the implications for soil health and soil microbial populations when we have those low levels of glyphosate and AMPA present in the soil profile? Actually, I said low levels, but I would be curious. What does the landscape look like? What are the types of levels that you are commonly observing?

We've seen levels. Well, we have seen levels in the high hundreds, so 7, 8, 900 nanograms per gram, 78900 parts per per billion. In the soil. We have also in organic, we have seen levels that are very, very low, undetectable in many cases. But we also see in organic land because it doesn't. A three year transition doesn't get you to perfectly pure soil. With the glyphosate you see it going down, but it isn't completely disappeared. And we don't know yet how much it takes to have an impact on the microbiome. I would love to do some comparative work where we look at the microbiome and the soil glyphosate at the same time. One thing we do know is that very low levels of glyphosate can be not so harmful to a crop. For instance, there is a lot of evidence that's what's happening in, in many orchards and in many sort of perennial crops is that people are managing the weeds in those orchards with glyphosate. And what happens is that the glyphosate goes into the soil, even the weeds that absorb it die and rot and then that goes into the soil and it's taken up by the roots of the orange or the apple orchard apple trees. You can find the glyphosate in the fruit. And it's there at. Yeah, you don't find it at very high levels, but it's there. This is the case for wine and cranberries and blueberries and, you know, you name it. Cocoa and coffee and tea.

You say you don't find it at very high levels, but what is that? Are they at the levels above 10 parts per billion?

Yeah, they are. They are. We've seen them up to 100, 150. You know, those are typical levels. And those higher levels are of concern with health. A grape vineyard that is being made into wine, you may end up with wine that has a level of glyphosate that could be concerning. If you're drinking orange juice every morning and it's from a conventional orchard, you're probably getting enough glyphosate so that it's a concern. And so you have to be of concern in that way. You have to be careful that way. But we still don't know what's happening to the soil and to the microbiome of the soil. And for those orange orchards, you know, we've all heard of this greening, this citrus greening, could that be due to the glyphosate that's being absorbed by those plants? That's an open question. We know it's linked to the microbiome in some ways.

Yeah. We've been successful in reversing citrus greening. And glyphosate is certainly one of a combination of contributing factors.

What else do you find that's involved?

The simple way to say it is that they have achieved a tipping point, a threshold. Forty years ago, citrus production used to include cover cropping, where there were plants growing under the orchard floor all the time. They applied lots of compost. They had soil that had very high levels of organic matter. And then all of that changed. They started using glyphosate. The soil was bare, became exposed to sunlight. That, of course, triggered lots of oxidation, lots of loss of organic matter. Today you have these very sandy soils that don't have any organic matter left. They're very oxidized. The soil microbiome is really compromised as a result. The trees are now absorbing very different forms of nitrogen. They're absorbing lots of ammonium and lots of nitrate instead of organic forms of nitrogen. Calcium availability has dropped through the roof. And there's all kinds of the combination of nutritional factors and microbial factors that have really changed significantly from the way citrus was produced 20 or 30 years ago.

It can be a train crash or A car crash, you know, it's a big problem, but you've had success with bringing it around. And it probably had a lot to do with composting and, you know, regenerating that soil in those ways.

We were actually able to turn trees around completely where they lost all the visual symptoms of citrus greening in 18 months simply with foliar applications and nutrition management. Now, that's the short term. The longer term is, yes, we do need to regenerate that soil health, but it's possible to turn it around very.

Quick so you can save an orchard instead of having to pull it out and burn it.

Oh, yes, very easily.

Beautiful. That's important. It really is.

It's important for many different crops and for hope and optimism in general.

Yeah. Just one more thing about glyphosate before we leave that, and that is that there is now quite a lot of awareness of glyphosate as a threat to the health of the consumer. And as a result, there is a market for glyphosate free grains and other crops. But what we're finding is that there are especially. This is the case with the legumes that it appears that some producers are shifting from glyphosate to paraquat. This is not good. Paraquat is at least as toxic and harmful as glyphosate in different ways, but it is serious. It's just not something that human beings should be consuming. And this is happening. So any growers out there that are thinking about making that transition, please don't do it. It's not good for your crop, it's not good for you for the applicator. Paraquat is much more dangerous than glyphosate. It has been closely linked with Parkinson's disease. And the scary thing about paraquat is that it accumulates glyphosate. You wash out of your system. So if you stop eating things that have glyphosate in them, it goes away. But with paraquat, it's a different story. It accumulates and from what I understand, it accumulates in your brain and essentially short circuits, important metabolic processes in the brain. It may well be that the result of that is Parkinson's disease. So you don't want to mess with that chemical or with other diquat, other ones like that. So just I put my pitch in for that and it's.

Thank you for sharing that, John. John, this conversation has been a joy to learn about all of the new analytical tools that we have to evaluate what nutrient density actually means and how we can evolve that and also what we should be cautious of. I think your perspective is a very valuable one because you have spent a lot of time looking for things that some people would prefer to avoid looking for and others obviously want to know what's going on. So thank you for being here and for sharing your wisdom and knowledge.

Oh, it's my pleasure. I really have enjoyed this conversation, John, and look forward to more like it.

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